Saturday, December 2, 2017

Nobody in the North Says He’s “Born to Rule”

Every once in a while, discredited urban legends get
rehabilitated, infused with a new life, and recirculated to unsuspecting
people. That is what is happening to the falsehood that northerners, and
specifically Sokoto State, proclaim divine rights to the rulership of Nigeria.
I wrote an article to falsify this myth on January 10, 2015. But the renewed
circulation of the myth on social media in the past few weeks has caused many
people to request that I republish the article. So here you go. It has been
edited for space.

Some myths and urban legends just never die. They endure denials,
resist succumbing to the truth, are impervious to reason, enjoy
intergenerational perpetuation, and continually subsist on the rank ignorance
that they cultivate and circulate. One such myth in Nigeria’s political
discourse is the notion that northerners are so cocksure that the right to
exclusively rule Nigeria in perpetuity is their manifest destiny that they have
fossilized this sentiment in a license-plate slogan, which is putatively “born
to rule.”

Popular narratives in Nigeria’s south have coalesced around the
notion that this purported “born-to-rule” license-plate slogan belongs to
Sokoto State, the cultural and symbolic epicenter of the Muslim north.

The persistence of this narrative caused me to wonder in what
kinds of social circles this myth still enjoys credibility since most of the
people who peddle it on the Nigerian social media sphere are really young
people with very little, if any, cultural and social capital. So I searched
“born to rule Sokoto Nigeria” on Google tosee
what comes up. I found scores of historical and contemporary references to the
claim that Sokoto State’s officially sanctioned license-plate catch phrase is
“Born to rule.” I found the claim in books, newspaper articles, Internet
discussion forums, and so on.

I found a particularly egregious one in an opinion column by an
overweeningly self-important man by the name of Ochereome Nnanna who claimed in
a June 2, 2014 article in Vanguard titled “North’s lovers and deceivers” that “Sokoto State
actually has ‘Born To Rule’ as its state slogan, just as we have ‘Centre of
Excellence’ as the motto of Lagos State.” Notice he said “actually.” Talk of
arrogance in ignorance.

Several websites, including Wikipedia, identify Sokoto State’s
slogan as “Seat of the Caliphate.” If the man has never seen a car with a
Sokoto State license plate all his life, a simple Google search would have been
enough to cure his insularity and provincialism. I guess he didn’t want pesky
facts to get in the way of a good bigoted narrative.

But it gets even more interesting. People who discover that Sokoto
State’s license-plate slogan is actually not “Born to Rule” have taken to
twisting the facts to give comfort to the prejudices that they had carefully
nursed for years. They say Sokoto State used to have “Born to Rule” as its
state slogan but changed it in the wake of mass outrage from other Nigerians.
For instance, a certain Dr. Obi Iheduru wrote on a Nigerian Internet discussion group that
“The offensive state license-plate motto ‘BORN TO RULE’ was for Sokoto state….
It has since been replaced with some uninspiring inscription after objections
were raised by Nigerians from several walks of life.”

First, this is a transparent lie. Second, notice that the man
couldn’t even mention the putative “uninspiring inscription” that has replaced
the alleged initial “Born to Rule” slogan. Yet the author of these claims
appends “Ph.D.” to his name and makes assertions with the certitude of an
expert on the subject. Anybody who bothers to find out will know that at no
point in its history has Sokoto State ever had “Born to Rule” as its state
slogan.

This is easy to verify since license-plate state slogans started
only in the late 1990s in Nigeria. Sokoto State’s official
license-plate catchphrase from the beginning was and still is “Cibiyar
daular usmaniyya,” which is Hausa for the nucleus or the navel of the Usman
Danfodio caliphate. The English version of the slogan has been rendered as
“Seat of the Caliphate,” which I think is a great idiomatic translation.

How did this ludicrously odd, easily challengeable urban legend
take roots in Nigerian political discourse for so long? But, first, how did it
start? A lot of people don’t realize that it started from a widely sold
Nigerian current affairs pamphlet that, among other bits of information, listed
states in Nigeria and their number-plate slogans. The author of the pamphlet
apparently didn’t know what “Cibiyar daular usmaniyya” meant,
decided against asking any Hausa speaker for help, and chose to translate the
phrase into English as “Born to Rule.” And southern Nigerians who have never
seen a Sokoto State license-plate number assumed that the author was right.
That’s how the falsehood was inscribed in the popular consciousness of southern
Nigerians. Now, it has acquired a life of its own and is almost impossible to
kill.

I thought it should be obvious to any moderately intelligent
person that no person who is arrogant enough to think that he is destined to
rule others in perpetuity would proclaim this so loudly and even go so far as
to rigidify it on a number-plate for the world to see. But this shouldn’t
surprise me. A large number of Nigerians also believe that America calls itself
“God’s own country” when it does not. (See my March 12, 2011 article titled “Is America ‘God’s own country’?”

Well, the “born-to-rule” urban legend is getting a new lease of
life because of the passions of the politics of the moment, but it behooves those
of us who earn a living by educating people to offer a robust and systematic
rebuttal to this farcical lie. It won’t kill it, but it will at least offer a
counter narrative for people who seek the truth.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.